"Translation:  There isn't actually any way and you know that.  Do you have any actual advice for me about how an adult deals with this situation, sir?"

"It is my sincere hope that you continue ignoring and willfully misinterpreting all the good advice you get, for the rest of your short life, until you crash and burn and go to Hell, traitor. I have no further advice."

"Then you're fucking useless to Cheliax, and I hope that Sevar, who isn't going to break because that's not how any tropes work, sends you off to endure whatever punishment she got so you can break within your first hour, sir."

At that he lights her on fire. 

Asmodia would like to say that she stands there stoically and takes it, but in fact after a round she cries out and tries to put herself out.

"Oh, you're really going to enjoy Hell, traitor," he says, and lets her put herself out before her clothes are destroyed entirely, since they do in fact still want her working on the project and all.

Then she'll head over to Maillol with her clothing half-ruined, a nice walking metaphor for the state of the Project with nobody in control of anything.

(Asmodia had, in fact, estimated that her future job would be easier if she could say, here's what happened when I tried talking to the one person whose job it was -)

"Asmodia, your superiors are not stupid.  Abarco wouldn't have lit on you on fire if he wasn't confident that a transcript of the situation wouldn't justify that decision to me, and you getting yourself lit on fire on purpose won't particularly impress me."

"Are you, in fact, going to order Security to lay off researchers who are trying to work, sir?"

"You know me well enough to know exactly how much I want to do that, Asmodia, but Subirachs wouldn't back me on it, and, let's be very clear here, Subirachs has a point.  Sevar's absence is an opportunity to shake out the Project and find out what its natural structure looks like under ordinary Asmodeanism when we're not trying to force anything.  If it ends up looking miserable, Security won't have a platform to stand on when Sevar storms back in and says she's rearranging things."

"And watch your fucking tone.  Last warning."

Asmodia will ask politely, then, about whether there's any sort of plan, or any sort of orders for her, or any advice on how an adult should behave in this situation given that, hypothetically, Asmodia was actually trying to do her job or even just be loyal to Carissa Sevar.

Give up, lose hope, and endure... for slightly less than a month.  It's not going to kill her, seriously.  If Asmodia can't handle this incredibly tiny amount of adversity she is genuinely not suited to hold power in Cheliax.

Asmodia no longer wishes to hold power in Cheliax.  She wants to serve somebody like Sevar, in some position of justly earned pride, and be protected by her superior in exchange for doing her job with pride and competence.

Every manager in Cheliax is holding their power in a position of service to someone above.  You don't get to serve with as much power as Asmodia was given, without being able to defend it.

So the new Cheliax doesn't get to have any competent researchers, unless those researchers are also able to defend themselves from their own Security on Chaotic projects?  No competent research managers, unless those managers have the separate and additional skill of being able to win a political game that looks frankly unwinnable?  Is the plan also that Osirion does this to themselves too, to keep that contest fair?

"The plan is that you shut up and do your job.  Try to win the game, stay quiet and endure for a few weeks, either's fine by me, but you're trying my patience, Asmodia."

"And the fact is, the Asmodean system isn't perfect, but it's better.  If you'd seen the useless wastes of space in other countries that get appointed by their superiors as pets, who don't have to be strong enough to defend themselves except by appealing to their boss, you'd understand exactly why Asmodeus's tyranny has to work the way it does."

"Sir.  I would like the same deal Ione Sala got.  I work for Cheliax as an outsider, Security doesn't light me on fire."

"Ione Sala had her curse.  What the fuck do you think you have in the way of leverage?"

"That I am, in fact, one of the Trope Girls.  That with Ione and Sevar gone, I'm the only person here who even begins to understand the theory of that, unless Aspexia Rugatonn takes personal charge.  That all this insanity is messing with the story in ways that the Most High should have needed to approve.  That Abrogail Thrune promised Keltham that everything he valued in Cheliax would still be here waiting for his return, which includes not only Sevar but me.  If I just stop working, now that the basic deal has been broken under which I was previously working for Sevar and the Grand High Priestess - you can torture me into starting again, yes, but it will, in fact, break me.  Which deprives the Project of my actual and effective research, and destroys the Queen's plan to have everything Keltham wants here for him, and also destroys my usefulness to Aspexia Rugatonn's plan to produce her successor -"

Asmodia stops, then, because Maillol is writing something.

It's an order of torment, to be taken at some point during the next week.  Exactly as bad as the most severe punishment Asmodia had during her time in Ostenso, which Maillol has looked up, before this; because he doesn't want to break Asmodia, but he guessed that this point in time would come.

"Don't get this taken any time you need to do something important the next day, or anything at all in the next few hours," Maillol says, because you would not think adults could need to be told this, but Carissa Sevar has expanded his grasp of the possible.

"You're making a terrible -"

"Shut up."

"I resign."

"No you don't, and get an extra thirty lashes some other day."

Asmodia takes the sheet of paper and walks out of the office, not quite able to control the trembling of her body; from anger, horror, and sheer seething hatred of everything to do with Cheliax.

She thought, going into that office, that she didn't have to put up with this, she has the Gardens of Erecura, and it's not like she wants Cheliax to have the benefit of her research...

...why was she still here?